A World Outside

Sorry for the lack of posts this last week. I was out of town all of last week working on a non-ALFALFA science project. (Still galaxies, just not galaxies found with ALFALFA). I did get to give a talk on ALFALFA, though, which was fun. Although I only felt like that after the talk. If you had asked me before giving the talk, I might have shared different sentiments.

I’ll be catching up with ALFALFA projects and the exciting life of a graduate student this week in Ithaca, so things may be slow for a bit longer. Until then, you should check out Diamonds in the Sky, a collection of astronomy science fiction. And you should definitely check out Galaxy Zoo 2. I love the Galaxy Zoo project (and am slightly jealous). The goal of the Galaxy Zoo project is to have the public help with galaxy classifications. The human brain can distinguish different galaxy types relatively easily (with a little training) while computers are not yet capable of doing this sort of classification. Galaxy Zoo provides a large dataset and asks users to answer questions about galaxies. I suggest you go check it out – it’s lots of fun.